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Richard Just

Richard Just is the deputy editor of The New Republic. From September 2002 until December 2003, he was editor of The American Prospect Online. He graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 2001, with a degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. At Princeton, he was the editor-in-chief of The Daily Princetonian.

Richard is also the founder and executive director of The Daily Princetonian Class of 2001 Summer Journalism Program, a 10-day program for students from under-resourced high schools who are planning to pursue careers in journalism. The program is held annually on the campus of Princeton University; its inaugural session took place in August 2002.

Recent Articles

Dear TAP Online Readers: Today we are pleased to unveil a redesigned version of our weblog, Tapped -- the first of what I hope will be many improvements to The American Prospect Online that will take place in the near future. Tapped, as most of you by now know, is updated frequently during the day with commentary and analysis by several people affiliated with our magazine. It provides an opportunity for us to bring our point of view to bear on events as they develop. Even though it is written by several people, I edit all the material centrally in my capacity as online editor. During the coming months, I will be seeking to enlist as many of TAP 's editors and writers as possible to contribute regularly to Tapped. I hope that this effort will result in a product that reflects on an increasingly wide array of topics with expertise and thoughtfulness. Though unsigned, Tapped is not, strictly speaking, the editorial voice of the magazine. Our weblog frequently takes stances on issues...

T he drama may have been at the Washington Monument on Saturday afternoon -- but the progress was taking place at the other end of the National Mall. While the usual protesters with the usual assortment of messages that ran the gamut from the vaguely coherent to the unbecomingly spiteful took over the lawn just south of the monument; while they pretended to understand what suit-clad Ralph Nader was saying to them from the stage of the Sylvan Theater and watched skits on globalism performed by fellow activists ("The market is neutral in these matters!" screamed a man in a cape as he ran off stage); while they endured the taunts of a handful of conservative counterprotesters ("Fry Mumia" read one poster) and retorted with the odd rejoinder or wanking motion; while they held up signs saying "Congress: Another Israeli-Occupied Territory" and "No Blood for Oil"; while they went through the motions of protest and anger and outrage for reporters and cameras and, most of all, for each other;...

T his week, as the U.S. News & World Report college rankings hit newsstands across the nation, administrators at elite colleges will react as they do every year -- with a well-rehearsed display of dismissive disgust. They will call the rankings flawed indicators of a college's academic worth. They will encourage high school seniors not to base their college choices on an arbitrary list. And they will accuse U.S. News of having imposed an artificial competition on colleges desperate to move up even one or two slots in the rankings. They will be right about all these things -- and dead wrong about the big picture. The U.S. News rankings are no doubt flawed, arbitrary and subjective. As a result, they may well be the most maligned journalistic enterprise in America. But what university administrators and other critics rarely acknowledge is that the rankings are also a crucial bulwark against the creeping overvaluation of college sports at the expense of college academics . Without...

A tkins v. Virginia and Ring v. Arizona -- the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decisions restricting who can receive the death penalty and who can impose it -- are important for all sorts of reasons, but none quite as central as the fact that the rulings themselves aren't so important at all. At least not in the sense of importance that most Americans generally attach to Supreme Court rulings: These were not daring thunderbolts of judicial intervention aimed from on high, but rather decisions dictated, in many ways, from below. To be sure, for members of the anti-death-penalty movement, Atkins and Ring are confirmation from the top of the legal system that things are moving slowly in their direction. But evidence of such progress has been playing out in the court of public opinion for quite some time. Atkins and Ring -- which, respectively, ban the execution of the mentally retarded and stipulate that only juries, not judges, can impose the death penalty -- were merely symptoms that...

L ast week, I argued in a TAP Online piece that the main danger of school vouchers is their potential to undermine American unity: With Christians likely to flock primarily to Christian schools, Jews to Jewish schools and Muslims to Muslim schools, America's pluralistic melting pot could eventually start to splinter along religious lines. Yesterday, National Review Online proved my case. In a piece contending that such religious splintering would not be a mere by-product of school choice but rather part of the point , Seth Leibsohn and Chester E. Finn Jr. argue that Jews should embrace vouchers as a vehicle for reducing assimilation. "School choice would confer many benefits on America," they write. "One of them is helping to solve the problem of declining Jewish-American identity." They note the success of Orthodox communities in using Jewish day schools to ward off assimilation, and predict that school vouchers will entice less devout Jews to flock to similar schools. They then go...